HUNTINGTON, W.Va. -- Retired Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager, the pilot with 'The Right Stuff,' marked the 40th anniversary of his breaking the sound barrier Wednesday by flying to his native West Virginia, where he predicted that future fighter planes will be automated.
Yeager told a news conference that automated planes are ideal because they 'sniff you out and shoot you down.' But he said there will always be a role for pilots in America's defense forces.
'You'll never replace in a fighter plane the pilot himself,' said Yeager, who attended a ceremony in his hometown of Hamlin in which a statue of him was unveiled at Hamlin High School.
Yeager, still dressed in his green flight suit, flew over Hamlin early Wednesday to take some photographs. He then winged back to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for a 9:30 a.m. news conference.
He then buzzed Huntington in a Harrier jet before taking a helicopter to Hamlin for the statue unveiling.
The 64-year-old aviation ace declared the statue was 'pretty good' and said he really did not think about the fact that it has been 40 years since he made a historic super-sonic flight.
On Oct. 14, 1947, Yeager, then a test pilot, flew an experimental Bell X-1 at better than 700 mph over what now is Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert.
At a news conference Wednesday morning before taking off for Huntington, Yeager said the 1947 flight was all the more dangerous because there were no electronic flight simulators or sophisticated wind tunnels.
'We really didn't know what we were getting into,' said Yeager. 'We lost a lot of guys (in test flights), but that was the price you paid.'
Neither of Yeager's flights Wednesday exceeded the speed of sound, which requires a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration because the sonic shockwave can shatter windows.
Yeager's feats, along with those of other test pilots and early astronauts, were chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his best-seller, 'The Right Stuff.'
In it, Wolfe described Yeager, a West Virginia mountain boy who became a World War II pilot when he was barely out of his teens, as 'the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.'
But Yeager, now 64, said he 'really never flew to set records. In the old days, I was just a research pilot. The first couple of (test flights), I heaved my cookies.'
'Once we got a Mach 1 (the speed of sound), it opened up the whole universe to us, but we only looked on it as an accomplishment and moved on to something else, because we were very busy.'
Some pilots and scientists feared the mystical Mach 1 would disintegrate a plane before it broke the barrier. But in a jet named 'Glamorous Glennis' after his wife, Yeager managed to do what no one had done before.
Unlike America's pioneers in space, however, Yeager's fame was slow in spreading. Wolfe's book was the first popular piece of non-fiction to showcase Yeager's unparalleled skill as a pilot. The movie of the book made Yeager's name a household word.
Yeager retired from the Air Force in 1975. He now lives in Grass Valley, Calif., and has continued to test-fly fighter jets, including the Navy FA-18 Hornet and the F-20 Tigershark.
